His heart was pounding.
His hands were sweaty.
His eyelids twitched as he stared at the door’s handle.
If he could have said “Father, take this cup from me…”, he would have. But he knew that he had transgressed all God-fearing laws in coming to NightWhere in the first place. Those were not words he could utter, except in complete blasphemy. The only salvation was going to be the one he created. If he created one. That would remain to be seen in the next few minutes.
Mark opened the door.
The Watchers stood in a semicircle just yards from the doorway. They faced away from Mark.
They were watching Rae.
Mark’s wife knelt on a stone bench, prostrate before a man who was laid out on a stone table in the center of the room. Mark didn’t push the door fully open. Instead, he peered in and took in what was going on.
Rae wasn’t just lying down before the large, naked man.
She was fellating him.
With gusto.
Mark could see the muscles in her shoulders move as she bobbed her head up and down atop the man, sucking his manhood inside her mouth and then letting it out again as the Watchers…watched.
Only…the ironic thing about this sex act was…
She was giving head to a man who had…no head.
There was simply a bloody stump above his shoulders. The man’s neck simply…ended. In a clean line of crimson. Mark spied the fat-faced, disembodied head a few feet away from the table. It lay sideways on the floor, its dull eyes staring vaguely off into a distance it would never again see. Mark recognized those eyes. It was the head of the man who had chased him across the bed of hot coals with a whip and a smile.
Gordon. He couldn’t feel too awful to see how Gordon had met his end, yet…
“Jesus,” Mark whispered to himself.
His wife was diligently fellating a corpse.
It was hard to think of giving her a tender kiss and an “I love you, baby” and taking her home to his bed after witnessing that.
Mark closed his eyes and then reopened them, but the tableau remained the same. Rae’s beautiful ass moved faintly back and forth as she sucked the cock of a dead man, who seemed to watch what was happening to his broken body from the eyes of his head that rested sideways on the stone floor of the room. All while a bunch of robed ghouls looked on.
Part of Mark wanted to close the door and back away. Selena waited for him in the car. She was soft and beautiful and loving and…everything he had always wanted in a mate. And he’d left her behind. Alone. To rescue this woman who truly wanted to be beaten ’til she bled. And who apparently liked to suck the sex of the dead.
What was wrong with him?
“I still love her,” Mark said to himself. He couldn’t have explained why. Maybe it was just history. But he felt he owed her enough that he had to try to save her soul. I said better or worse, he thought, and said in his head that this was definitely worse.
“Wait,” a familiar voice said.
Mark looked over his shoulder to see the beautiful form of Selena. She stood there in the dark, bloody hallway like a sign of salvation. Pale skin an offering of white against the dark.
“You’re supposed to be in the car,” he whispered. A trace of anger entered his tone. He didn’t need her here, complicating an already difficult situation.
“I can’t let you do this,” she said. “I don’t care if you love me…but I can’t let you give them your soul. Not after all this…”
“I can’t let them take hers,” he said, backing away. “I have to do this. You know that.”
Selena stepped forward, slipping her arms around his neck and pulling the soft, luscious flesh of her body close to his own. He couldn’t help but melt when her breasts meshed against his chest.
But Mark felt something else too. Duty. Promise.
“I can’t,” he said. “I appreciate it but…”
“If you go in there, then I have failed. Everything I’ve given up was for nothing.”
Mark turned away from her when he saw the blood tears begin. He stared at the dark door that led to Rae. A voice inside him screamed to leave this alone. Walk away. Be with Selena.
But the part of him that mattered knew that he would never sleep well again if he walked now. He was here. He had to do his best, one last try, to save Rae. Mark pushed the door open and entered the room. It looked as if he’d entered a medieval torture chamber. The walls held dangling chains and manacles. A rack stretched all across one wall and whips, floggers, chains and other devices hung in a neat row. Nearby, a line of three tall steel boxes, vaguely human shaped, was against the wall. Mark recognized them as iron maidens.
But the focus of the room was the wide stone dais in the center. And that’s what everyone in the room was gathered around.
He stepped forward and the robed figure at the front of the table turned to stare directly at him.
Mark knew those evil eyes immediately, without even seeing the rest of the man’s face.
Kharon.
The Watcher.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” the ghoul said.
The rest of the robed figures turned as one to stare at Mark.
Rae looked up from her ministrations to see what Kharon was talking about, and her mouth split into a happy smile.
Watchers filed past Mark, exiting the room. Only…they weren’t leaving the ceremony. They were capturing Mark’s salvation.
They pulled Selena into the torture chamber and stripped her naked. She didn’t protest. Mark’s heart sank as he saw the cream globes of her ass step and shift as they led her to the table where the man’s corpse lay.
When the figures stopped near Rae, she looked directly at Mark, her lips wet with orgasm. “Hi, baby,” she said. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
At that moment, the dark woman stepped out of the shadows and picked up the head of the man on the table from where it lay abandoned on the floor. A smear of blood from its neck brushed against the black skin of her belly, and Mark thought she looked even more evil with that smear on her naked skin.
“Yvonna,” Rae smiled, greeting the woman.
The Midnight Queen only nodded and stepped forward with the head.
Rae rose from her crouch at the crotch of the dead man and grinned at Mark. He couldn’t help but stare at the snake pattern that covered her midsection. A tattoo that marked her forever as the property of sin.
Mark swallowed, thinking about that. He intended to drag her out of here, and she had NightWhere scarred into her flesh. Of course, he had put it there…
She teased her tongue out into the air at him, a teasing sensual display. Her face was smeared with blood and something almost clear; Mark knew it for what it was-a glazed mess of semen.
He thought she was going to walk towards him, but instead, she turned away.
The arms of the Night Mother wrapped around his wife’s pale shoulder blades, and Mark found himself watching his wife’s lips lock with the dark lips of Yvonna. The Midnight Queen’s long black fingers slipped around Rae’s back. His wife’s skin seemed to meld into the body of the other, despite the fact that they looked like representative figures of night and day.
Kharon walked forward to take Selena’s hand from the grasp of the other Watchers. His grin was vile.
“I’ve waited a long time for this,” he said. “Your blood will make us stronger for decades.”
Mark barely registered the words; he was already reaching for the gun he’d bought at the pawnshop. This was the moment, the reason that he’d gone to the lengths he had to own it.
He would never have crossed the law to own a gun before this night. He would never have thought that he’d be chasing his wife into the depths of hell though, either.
Yet, here they were.
Mark pulled out the gun, aimed it quickly at Kharon and fired.
The report was loud and somehow solemn.